Repairing Motherboard Trace

[shawner8690]

I have an older Asus p5ld2. Its always ran great for what i needed it to do. It ran a pentium 4 670 @ 4.51ghz. Made for a decent htpc. When i first bought the thing the cpu fan port never worked...ever! I cooled the cpu with the other fan ports, (splicing fans together etc.) worked great for months Then one day... SHUT_DOWN!!

No BSOD
No beeps...nothin... just OFF

Instantly i bought another cpu (figuring.. overvoltaged, oc'ed, sounds to me the proc finally gave out...) So i put the other one in and same thing... S*#T!!

So I take the board out (which i should of done in the first place) lol and what do i find... burnt trace...GREAT!!!

If at all possible id like to keep this thing running( its great for movies on the tv, fileserver, or old ass games that run on only a single core.)

anyway to the point is this fixable?






Heres pics
http://s1221.photobucket.com/albums/dd473/shawner8690/trace/



Also, those trace lead from one fan port to another

 

[shawner8690]

Anyone?

 

[Toxxyc]

Thing is, if a trace burned out, there's a reason for it. Nothing guarantees that the "retrace" will work for even a second before it will burn out as well. I want to tell you that you should have RMA'd the board the moment you got it, but I'm pretty sure you realize that by now.

Tracing it however would be most easily done with a tracing pen, which you can get from RadioShack (or somewhere similar). It has a highly conductive ink, and you simply redraw over the old trace path, and the ink will conduct electricity as the old trace used to.

I'm betting on getting a new mobo though, best choice.

 

[jsc]

It's a wide PCB trace. That means that it is carrying quite a bit of power. I would not trust conductive ink for this.

I would scrape the solder mask off the PCB trace, then bridge it with a piece of wire hand soldered to the PCB.

Actually, I have done that - mostly with power control boards. It takes a fair amount of skill, hopefully with good equipment. And you need to be careful not to apply too much heat or you will lift the trace off the PCB.

And even then, the motherboard may not work.

If you are going to try something like this, I recommend that you approach this with a "nothing to lose, it doesn't work, anyway" attitude.

 

[shawner8690]

Yes i should have rma'd it.. but too late for that.... The thing is, is i remember VERY THOROUGHLY inspecting this thing when i got it, (bought it from a friend) and remember seeing a very small nik in, i believe, that same trace...

Now what im thinking is, copper corrodes when exposed over time, and i think that nik in the trace eventually corroded through, and since i had so many fans attached on that line, caused it to burn through after the corrosion did it's thing. (I had a 120mm, 2x 90mm and 2 small ones (NB and SB size) ) all attached to it.

But anyway splicing with a wire is what im going to attempt. But should i try a couple small strands of wire, or do you think one strand bridged by solder will conduct enough for this trace??/

 

[shawner8690]

BTW this is the rev1.02 ASUS P5LD2 board. The highest CPU it can take is p4670 or a Pentium D... No c2d here....so im not too worried if it don't work.. lol

 

[pjmelect]

One strand of wire should be enough; you obviously had a short to cause the track to burn up like that. If the board still doesn’t work after you have repaired it, it is time for a new computer.

 

[shawner8690]

One strand of wire should be enough; you obviously had a short to cause the track to burn up like that. If the board still doesn’t work after you have repaired it, it is time for a new computer.

You don't think all those fans and a a small nik in that trace to begin with would cause that??/

 

[someguynamedmatt]

As has been said, I wouldn't recommend trying it on a new(er) board, but in your case, you don't really have much to lose. Something somewhere caused that to burn out - wide traces like that don't just decide to fry themselves. I'd be really surprised if it held, and it might just end up blowing the trace further down, or completely burning out a chip somewhere.

No, I don't think that fans would cause that. Not a wide high-power trace like that... it's running to something that has a larger power draw somewhere, which is probably what caused it. If it was just a burn-through from damage, it wouldn't have been as big of a strip of burnt trace as it is. You're right that the damage might have been just a starting place, kind of a 'seed' for the burnout to start at, but there was something bigger which caused it.

At least that's my opinion. 😉

 

[shawner8690]

I got it fixed!!!!... My hands were to shakey, so i drank a couple beers (to take off the shakes) and viola!!! I tried splicing a wire between the two traces, and could not get it to fuse to the traces... So i just melted a drop of solder on both ends of each trace, let them cool, and bridged them together...and protected it with some blue RTV silicone gasket maker. (stuff used on gaskets for cars) It works great again..

I can to the conclusion tho... That small nik that I had seen on that trace months ago, must have slowly corroded, as copper does when exposed ti air. After some time, that current flowing through such a small spot where it had degraded, must have heated up the trace right there enough to finally burn it in half..

I'd like to thank everyone who posted, and a BIG thanks to those two ICE-COLD, Blue Mountain COORS Lights (24oz of coarse!) for helping me steady my hands...